Cатсн²² (in)sесuяitу / ChrisJohnRiley

It seems like the guys behind Truecrypt managed to sneak out version 6 without many people noticing. I’ve not had a chance to look at the new version, but hope that they’ve made some improvements on it from version 5. A lot of people were disappointed with some of the changes made to Truecrypt between version 4 and 5. There were speed issues and a lot of Linux distributions stuck with the 4.3 release (i.e. Backtrack). Although personally I found version 5 to be suitable for my needs, I was a little disappointed in the lack of command line for windows. This gave me no end of problems when I wanted to script a password guesser and found my example Truecrypt volume (encrypted on version 5 naturally) fails every time when using the version 4.3 under Linux. The error message is suitably vague, saying the password is wrong or it is not a Truecrypt volume. I understand the need for vague responses in order to give deny-ability to the user, but still, it wasted a lot of computer cycles before I figured that one out. My fault for not reading the fine manual (RTFM).

Version 6 apparently deals with some of the speed issues by adding support for multiple CPU cores. Which is a fine addition if it works across Windows and Linux versions. I’ve not seen any mention of support for Smart Cards or tokens as encryption keys, but it’s something I’ve been hoping for in Truecrypt for a while now. That as well as a full disk encryption option that works for Linux as well as Windows systems. Hopefully I’ll have time to play with it soon and see what if anything it can provide over and above version 4.3 or 5.1